Introduction
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” challenges stereotypical perceptions of women’s mental health and societal roles and raises questions about freedom of expression. The piece of short fiction has been analyzed from different perspectives, with Conrad Shumaker digging deep into the story’s complexity in his article “Too Terribly Good to Be Printed: Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The author praises Gilman for offering an outstanding piece of literature and for effectively illustrating the nineteenth-century look at gender roles.
Article Summary
The article highlights that “The Yellow Wallpaper” was overlooked in the literary sphere for several decades before its rediscovery by scholars. The explanation for this failure to acknowledge the virtues of Gilman’s “small literary masterpiece” likely lay in the audience being unaccustomed to fiction that addressed the issues of mental health head-on (Shumaker 588). It was much easier to follow the fictitious approach to mental breakdown perception to avoid finding parallels with one’s own life. The story could ‘hit too close to home’ to some readers, which is why many preferred to stay away from the subject matter, specifically in the context of the patriarchal biases of the nineteenth century.
The article’s author points out how “The Yellow Wallpaper” attempted to break the glass ceiling and pave the way for the open discussion of the feminist agenda. In the nineteenth century, women in literature were portrayed as poetic or ethereal beings, which went along the “rational” husband and “imaginative” wife narrative (Shumaker 590). However, Gilman chooses to abandon the imaginative world, allowing readers to see life for what it is. Through retelling the story of the relationship between two spouses in the tale, Shumaker highlights that the two have different understandings of the situation. The wife is refused from doing many things that could make her better, with her mental illness perceived as a product of imagination. The exploration of the spouses’ relationship illustrates the persistence of institutionalized gender roles assigned to men and women.
Furthermore, the author praises Gilman for the depiction of the protagonist’s decline into madness for its accuracy, which includes capturing the symptoms of mental breakdown. Shumaker points out that the character does not reach freedom from her role; however, she is “free from the need to deceive herself and the true nature of her position” (598). At a certain point, the readers understand that the narrator is left confused and powerless within the constraints of her gender role, yet she attempts to break free from it.
Conclusion
The concluding statement that Shumaker makes in praise of the story is that it likely touched people deeply, with many trying to deny the reality of the situation. He writes, “It struck too deeply and effectively at traditional ways of seeing the world and woman’s place in it” (Shumaker 598). Self-deception is an essential point of the narrative, and the author mentions that women often resort to it as a result of being consistently put into a box of societal expectations of their roles as wives, mothers, and housekeepers. The “too terribly good to be printed” argument, thus, stems from Shumaker’s commentary on how Gilman perfectly captured a woman’s psyche, likely too perfectly to be understood by some.
Work Cited
Shumaker, Conrad. “Too Terribly Good to Be Printed”: Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” American Literature, vol. 57, no. 4, 1985, pp. 588-599.